Tent Boxing: An Australian Journey

When Wayne McLennan was growing up in a sleepy Australian mining town in the 1950s, the most exciting event of the year was the arrival of Jimmy Sharman's boxing tent. Sharman's boxers would stand on a raised platform, in front of a large painted tent, challenging the local men and boys to box, but also challenging their preconceptions about Aboriginals, who made up the bulk of Sharman's fighters. This all finished in 1969, when the boxing tents were banned. After many years of adventures overseas - goldmining in Costa Rica, fishing in Nicaragua, rowing from Seattle to Alaska - Wayne McLennan returned to Australia to find, to his delight, that a few boxing tents still existed in remote, northern Australia. Using his own experience of boxing professionally, and training boxers himself, McLennan worked at one of these tents and in the process of finding out what makes a man fight for money, he learned a lot about Australia and a lot about himself.